Tsinghua Unigroup, Chongqing to invest up to $100 bln in IC sites over next decade

Reuters Staff

2 Min Read

SINGAPORE, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd has signed an agreement with the government of the Chinese city of Chongqing and Sino IC Capital to set up an integrated circuit (IC) investment firm, which will invest up to $100 billion in the Chinese state chipmaker’s IC sites over the next decade.

The government of Chongqing, where Tsinghua Unigroup is building a 60 billion yuan ($9.46 billion) industrial park, said in a statement on its website on Tuesday that the IC firm would have registered capital of 100 billion yuan. It did not disclose how much each partner was investing.

State news agency Xinhua, which reported the news on Wednesday, said this was the biggest industrial investment in Chongqing since it became China’s fourth province-level municipality in 1997.

Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd, China’s biggest state-owned semiconductor group, leads Beijing’s ambitions to develop a domestic chip champion. It is also building a $30 billion memory chip factory in Nanjing and a $24 billion chip factory in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Sino IC Capital was set up in August 2014 by Chinese state investors and has about 138.7 billion yuan in funds under management to invest in the semiconductor space.

Its subsidiary, Unic Capital Management, last year agreed to acquire U.S. semiconductor testing company Xcerra Corp for $580 million in cash. ($1 = 6.3448 Chinese yuan) (Reporting by Brenda Goh; Editing by Amrutha Gayathri)